Joe Blundo commentary: Internet satisfies urge to see misfortune

Tuesday

Apr 2, 2013 at 12:01 AMApr 2, 2013 at 2:04 PM

CBS is getting some praise for the restraint it showed on Sunday, when it limited itself to two replays of the gruesome leg fracture suffered by a Louisville basketball player. Of course, CBS really can't limit anything anymore.

CBS is getting some praise for the restraint it showed on Sunday, when it limited itself to two replays of the gruesome leg fracture suffered by a Louisville basketball player.

Of course, CBS really can’t limit anything anymore. We live in the YouTube age.So the injury to Kevin Ware in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament has been viewed millions of times online.

(The replay isn’t a close-up, but it’s still awful to see — far worse than “Sidney Crosby puck to face,” the other sports injury video from the weekend.)

What to make of all those YouTube views? Something about watching a man suffer a compound fracture, I guess, is irresistible. It’s the same impulse that causes people to gawk at traffic accidents.

“I think the reasons we can’t look away are both good and bad,” said Eric Wilson, a Wake Forest University professor who wrote a 2012 book about morbid curiosity called Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck: Why We Can’t Look Away.

On the bad side, there’s the titillation factor.

“Science shows that, when we watch violence, our heart rate goes up; our brain releases chemicals; we get a rush,” Wilson said. “Certainly that can lead to exploitation of someone’s suffering.”

On the good side, Wilson said, when people flock to a misfortune, they are empathizing with the pain of another.

“It’s a shared community of grievers and mourners, as it were.”

Some scientists theorize that our urge to look is a byproduct of the very thing that enables us to put ourselves in another’s place — imagination.It leads us to want to see what’s happening so we can share the experience, Wilson said.

“It’s strangely pleasurable to think outside yourself.”

Wilson, who writes in the book that he has had a lifelong fascination with the macabre, said the bottom line for him is motivation. Gore and violence can be a way for people to think about the meaning of death and suffering — which is healthy. Or it can just be a form of pornography.

As he writes in the book: “Look. Don’t look. This refrain has played in my head much of my life, one voice telling me it’s wrong to stare at morbid events and another urging me to stare anyway, hard.”

Of course, we have arrived at an age when people can stare at morbid events 24 hours a day if they choose. It’s all just a click away. Who knows what effect that has?

Ware’s injury, as terrible as it was, comes with an element of uplift: While lying in agony on a stretcher in the arena, he still had the presence of mind to exhort his teammates to win the game — which they did.

Knowing that part of the story almost makes it easier to watch a replay of the injury — almost. With my low tolerance for on-screen gore, real or imagined, I still found it unbearable. I kind of squinted to blunt the effect.

Even then, it was doubly unpleasant: It made me wince to see his leg give way, and it made me feel guilty for wanting to watch.